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tv   Our World  BBC News  January 29, 2017 3:30am-4:01am GMT

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of foreign nationals were detained at us airports following president trump's crackdown on immigration and refugees. a federaljudge has issued an emergency stay order that temporarily blocks the government from deporting people who land with valid visas. the british prime minister theresa may and the turkish president have signed a $125 million defence agreement during their talks in ankara. the deal to develop turkey's fighter aircraft could lead to multi—billion dollar contracts. they also discussed a possible trade deal after britain leaves the eu. wildfires in southern and central chile are now known to have killed at least 11 people and left several thousand others homeless. firefighters and volunteers are tackling more than 100 separate fires, half of which are still out of control. lorry drivers should be banned from using sat navs designed for cars, according to council chiefs. the calls to change navigation systems come after a number of lorries have got stuck in narrow roads or under low bridges.
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the local government association wants legislation brought in to make it compulsory for all lorry drivers in england and wales to use sat—navs specifically designed for their vehicle. keith doyle reports. when a large lorry tried to cross this bridge over the thames in buckinghamshire last year it caused hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage. it was ten times heavier than the bridge‘s weight limit, but it's sat nav didn't know that. sat navs are leading large vehicles into unsuitable roads across the country, causing damage and disruption. the local government association, which represents local authorities across england and wales, says truck drivers using sat navs and phones meant for cars are causing mayhem. they want lorry drivers to be forced to use the right kind of sat navs for large vehicles. we're seeing a growing problem. i get more and more complaints from local residents, they see country lanes blocked
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by vehicles that shouldn't be going down them, they see local high street is blocked by hgv vehicles and also local economies are hit when you just see big lorries going over bridges theyjust can't take the weight for. most truck drivers do use the right kind of sat navs but they say they're no substitute for commonsense. sat navs are ok but you can't rely on them, we have a special one for hgvs and even they go wrong. so it's just watching roadsigns and being careful, that's not to say you don't come unstuck and you have to turn around sometimes. the bridge has now reopened after two months of repairs but locals say they live in fear of a similar accident closing it at any time, and that's the local government association says something is to be done to stop drivers of large vehicles using the wrong kind of sat nav that is leading them into nothing but trouble. keith doyle, bbc news. now on bbc news, it's our world.
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in the final week of the obama presidency, a louisiana high school marching band rehearses for the big day. we do not see colour, race, gender or ethnicity. we see potential. they are one of ten school bands chosen to play at the inauguration. there has been a lot of talk of how we need healing and sometimes... you just have to do it. but as it marks the transition from obama to trump, america is having two very different conversations about race. this is the life that black people live. this is the life that we live so it is not a conversation about race, it is just a conversation. and with tensions over
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the issues of police killings white supremacists feel emboldened. hailtrump! hail our people! hail victory! and for some, talk of a return to the good old days signifies nothing good at all. i look at is as master has reclaimed his house. and even though master allowed the slaves to look after the house while he was on vacation, we are still in the same fight that we have been in. barack obama called slavery "america's original sin." his presidency once held promise of redemption. that has not happened. as this country enters the trump era, the divisions between black and white america are felt, perhaps, more starkly than they have been in a generation. cheering if there is anyone out there who still doubts that america
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is a place where all things are possible, tonight is your answer. ‘formation' by beyonce plays that was the era of yes, we can. when black america seemed poised to claim a confidence, a power, a parity long denied it. # y'all haters corny with that illuminati mess. # paparazzi, catch my fly and my cocky fresh. # i'm so reckless when i rock my givenchy dress. # i'm so possessive so i rock his roc necklaces. # my daddy alabama, momma louisiana. but america was not ready. to me it is a race war. you have black against white, white against black.
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# earned all this money but they never take the country out me. # i got a hot sauce in my bag, swag. from the swamps of washington to the baoyou of the south. beneath the surface of the post—racial society, fear. anger. and the deep roots of a history still unresolved. the final week of the obama presidency began with the annual commemoration for a man who gave his life for the civil rights struggle. america has come a long way since then. in new orleans they mark dr king's memory with a show of sartorial pride. our self—esteem has grown from us knowing about each other. black men can see each other in a greater image that have been
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portrayed in media, music — the negative image we are always told about. in this respect, the obama's scandal—free tenure at the white house has had huge symbolic value. so you think about a boy like... how old are you? seven. you know who the president is? um, barack obama. do you know who the president was before him? see? all he has ever known was obama. his life, like this, it is normal. it is normal for him to see a black man at the head of a free nation. a symbol is a powerful thing. the very fact of obama's unlikely presidency has expanded the concept of what is possible for millions of americans, black and white. but when it comes to cold hard statistics, the truth is that if you are black in america the odds are still stacked against you. in 2013, the median net worth
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of a white american household was over $140,000. for black households, that figure was $11,000. that's 13 times less. under obama, the wealth gap has widened. travel up the mississippi from new orleans and you come to baton rouge, one of the most divided cities in the united states. for some children at inner—city high schools, the education they got for some children at inner—city high schools, the education they get on the streets can seem more important than what is on offer in the classroom. you can go out there tomorrow, have your pistol, shoot somebody, then you end up in prison for the rest of your life. arthur ‘silky slim' reed is a former gang leader turned activist whose mission now is to stop young black men following his footsteps. it's 2017 and you are still walking
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around looking and acting exactly like slaves. and the world is looking at you as animals. why? because you live that lifestyle. barack obama often told black americans they had to take responsibility for the problems in their own community. silky agrees, up to a point. i am trying to bring a message to black people that have black lives do not matter to black people than it should not matter to anybody else. that's my message. so black lives have to matter to black people first before it matters to the rest of the world. black lives matter focus on police killing but i need to look at what we are doing to ourselves and try to resurrect us from the spiritual depths that we are in before i can really worry about the 200 or 300 killings taking place by law enforcement. we are dying by the thousands
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by our own hands so i am focusing on that and then i stay on that. poverty. i have grown up in poverty and i became a gang leader because i was starving. if i'm in this house and i don't have anything to eat i beg before i steal, but i steal before i starve. so i take what i need because self—preservation is a law of nature. so when i am finding out that i do not have the necessities of life, i will go out and get those necessities, regardless of what the world says. i need to survive, just like anybody else. but there are also inequalities that are systemic and ingrained. if you are black you are more likely to be arrested, get a longerjail sentence and more likely to be shot dead by police. 0bama only engaged with this issue late in his presidency and then with limited results. black quarterbacks on the team of white supremacy hasn't helped us. a blackjudge can't help us
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if the law is the law. the judge have to abide by the law. same for the black president. as far as black folks on the whole, politically we didn't gain anything. when you do the research and you look at the numbers, then if you and i wanted to get married, we could get married. the gays accomplished something, you see what i am saying? i can't always just pressure it because at the end of the day we didn't ask for anything. we did not want to put that burden on the black man in the white house. we did not want to give him that burden. if you do not ask for anything you get nothing so you cannot be disappointed. so you say that the black community gave barack obama a free pass? definitely. he is one of us. it is over 60 years since the supreme court ruled segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.
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ten years later the civil rights act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race. but today in cities across america it is all too obvious that de facto segregation is still very much in effect. if you look at a demographic map of baton rouge you will see that this road here, florida street, is a stark dividing line. everything to the north is overwhelmingly black, everything to the south is mostly white. now, i've spent time in divided cities. places like baghdad in beirut, places where they have recently had a war. there has not been a war here since the 1860s when the north fought the confederacy over the issue of slavery. but last summer it felt like war was not far away. the killing of alton sterling, the latest in a string of fatal police shootings caught on camera.
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they are shooting right now and there is an officer down. two days later at a black lives matter protest in dallas, a black guhman opened fire on police killing five. not long after that, more officers were shot dead in baton rouge. to me this is a race war. you have black against white, white against black. there would not be so many black people against white people, i think, if it wasn't for the police brutality. that was pushing that situation with some of the people. nefertiti is part of a growing movement of radical black activists. during the black lives matter protests she says she too found herself on the receiving end of some heavy—handed treatment from the police. going to a protest downtown to city hall and police officers approached me, they'd dislocated my shoulder and fractured my left finger. more recently and i'm recovering from that,
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but all was basically because i am part of a new black panther party and they assumed that the chapter out there protesting at the time, that i was a part of that chapter, but i was not. it is perhaps ironic that relations between the police and the black community reached their lowest point in a generation during the final years of the obama presidency. the killings by police and a lack of prosecutions of officers involved has entrenched a sense here of a force that does not serve and protect, but one that operates with impunity. everybody‘s on edge, 0k? we're waiting on a decision from the department ofjustice. so people wantjustice and they want transparency. so that is the main thing that folks want. transparency and justice. recently we've had a shooting with alton sterling about two blocks down the street. we had police killings
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on the highway and we had a flood. so our community is broken. we are trying to get back together. the baton rouge police department is acutely aware of the need to rebuild trust. to that end, sergeant riley harbour is dispatched of a weekend to do a spot of gardening at an inner city schooljust round the corner from where he grew up. this is what passes for community outreach. the citizens here have a right to be upset with all the different things that have happened, both from the civilian side and from law enforcement. we've had losses on both, tragic all the way round, but we still have to be able to come together because we've still got to live. baton rouge is braced for more trouble as it awaits the outcome of a federal investigation into the shooting of alton sterling. nefertiti says the tensions between the black community and the police have brought an old enemy out into the open. last year, about seven
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months ago, the klansmen, the ku klux klan aryan nation put flyers out recruiting members and this was particularly right after alton sterling was killed, they had it on the news that they were putting notes on people's doors, going through the neighbourhood. nefertiti and silky slim rang the number on the leaflet, it went through to a pre—recorded message which had clearly been updated in the past few days. hailtrump! hail our people! hail our victory! not long after the election, a group of white nationalists gathered to discuss the new political landscape. the final speaker was richard spencer, who coined the term alt—right, a movement associated with donald trump's former campaign
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ceo steve bannon, who wasn't present but who is now one of the most powerful men in the white house. america was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. this then is the context in which donald trump has taken office. america's new president has disavowed support from overt racists but still, in baton rouge the tranquil surroundings of university lake near the college campus belies a sense of unease. tina lang and meet lewis maurice are here for a photo shoot. they're expecting their first child in march. they want to remember this special time. but they fear their unborn daughter's future may not necessarily be brighter than their own. we don't know how it will be for african—americans now to four years down the line,
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six years down the line. we don't know what will happen. even when obama was in office you seen officers were killing young black males and really weren't getting penalised for it. now that it's trump, you never know. it'll be hard for us to get those opportunities and have that freedom to get the best education and to get the bestjobs, you know what i'm saying, just because of our race and the perspective that others have on us. so that is what i'm afraid of for my child. here in the south the shadow of the plantations, the memory ofjim crow, of america's original sin still loom large. it takes more than eight years to dismantle a social system that's been in place before the country was even established, before the country talked
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about creating some people equal and allowing some to have the pursuit of life and liberty and happiness, they had individuals that were even considered human, they were treated as chattel. the situation you're talking about is normative for america so to see something other than that is to see something radically different from actually what america is and how it came into being, which is deeply, deeply antiblack. barack 0bama's legacy is a subject of fierce disagreement but radically different is not an assessment often applied to his record in office. for some the election of donald trump looks less like a sudden change of direction than a resumption of the status quo. i look at it like master has reclaimed his house. i know master's place, you see what i'm saying, i know my place, i'm in the field, i don't try to get up to the house, know what i'm saying? you're talking about slavery here. of course.
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that's the dynamic you're talking about. it's the oppression. you're saying it never really went away? no, even though master allowed one of the slaves to look after the house when he was on vacation we are still in the same fight that we've been in for the last 2115 years. in all seriousness, there is a huge legacy of slavery but you can't say things haven't changed since the 1860s, since the 1960s? definitely. there's no forced free labour here with the slaves, right? and what america has been successful in doing is creating these slums and ghettos, putting you in these areas and then making the police still oversee you like we're still on the plantation. so what goes on in the white community don't happen in the black community, so when the police come here they say, "get up against the car." "i've got rights, shut the hell up."
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it's a different treatment. it's still like the overseers overseeing the plantation, we just don't have to go to work. announcer: next up, from louisiana, it's the west monroe high school marching band and raiders. inauguration. after the speech and the oath of office there's a moment in the spotlight for the high school marching band louisiana. then the parade moves on. and so america begins a new chapter in its long book on race, weaving in the history of slavery, of segregation with that of martin luther king and of the obama era. from my experience, i think the american dream is still alive for anyone who wants to reach for it. there are african—americans in all areas of life that
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are quite, quite successful. i think that the road may be a little narrower and a little more stoney at times, but i think the american dream is still achievable for everyone if you work hard and live right and play by the rules then success happens. jaylen, 11 years old, has known no other president but obama. for her and her friends, president trump was at first a frightening prospect. we was all thinking about, like, what if he actually sends us back to africa? that was your first thought, that you might not be allowed to be an american any more? yes, sir. that sounds like a scary thought? yeah. at first we were all, like, at first we were saying it's going to happen, but we talked about it one day at school and we was, like, it can happen unless everybody says yes to it. jaylen is ambitious.
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after harvard law school she wants to become america's first black female present, but... i think he is going to try and make everything harder for blacks to get in, everything harder for hispanics to get in, everything harder for anybody of colour to try to do or try and be something. jaylen has one of those teachers you remember for the rest of your life, someone who helps you make sense of a bewildering world. i think that people were sick of talking about race. white people or black people or everyone? i would say from my experience mostly white people. it's overwhelming, i can understand that from the perspective where you've never had to deal with it, you don't understand why we keep bringing it up over and over again. and i think that especially with the heightened sense of awareness of police shootings
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and police brutality and the injustices being so blatantly put in your face because of social media, white people started to have a backlash and they started to think that no—one is representing me, everyone is talking about black people and not talking about me, so how can i make it somewhat about me? " and so the age of trump began as all presidencies usually do with a promise of inconcinnity. to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people. but donald trump's opponents fear quite the opposite. there are those who fear that the new president is a man with a vindictive streak who may use the power of his office to lash out at those who opposed him. i'd like to punch him
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in the face, i tell you. many liberals, especially white liberals, see trump as an existential threat to the founding principles of america. but from the black perspective things can look a little different. it doesn't scare me, i don't have an issue with trump or whatever he do because everyone gets in there and does the same thing. when black america contemplates the prospect of a hostile perhaps even oppressive state it shrugs and asks, what else is new? hello there.
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the weather is changing somewhat as we head over the next few days. and we will be losing the wintry chill that has been with us for a while. but not just yet. we still have icy conditions, particularly across the northern parts of the country but we could see icy stretches almost anywhere to start sunday. a cold start to the day with rain moving in as we head through the course of the day, heading in from the south—west. many areas, across the north of the country in particular, below freezing first thing in the morning in more rural spots. that means we could have slippery surfaces and icy conditions almost anywhere across the country. it is milder towards the south—west as the cloud creeps in here, bringing outbreaks of rain. sunshine for much of scotland and northern england lasting for quite a part of the day but northern ireland and wales,
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central and south—western england we will see the rain heading in. mild temperatures into double figures, particularly towards the south—west but breezy at times as well. the far south—east and east anglia are likely to stay dry into the middle part of the afternoon but the rain pours in across the midlands towards northern ireland. sunshine for northumberland and much of scotland with a chance of wintry showers continuing up towards the northern isles. a lot going on in sunday. eventually that rain will move towards the east as we head into monday. we are left with a lot of cloud, low cloud, mist, fog and some freezing fog. still cold conditions across many northern and north—eastern parts of the country, whereas towards the south—west we have milder air heading in. a murky day on monday. a lot of cloud, freezing fog or fog patches. later in the day we will see further outbreaks of patchy rain heading their way slowly eastwards mainly affecting the western part of the country. further east you will stay dry but also colder. six degrees in aberdeen and around 11 in plymouth. as we move through the latter part of monday into tuesday you can see the frontal system moving in from the atlantic, slowly across the country because there is still pressure
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slowing things down. we are likely to see a spell of wet weather on tuesday moving in from the west, a lot of cloud once again. low cloud, hill fog as well but with that southerly breeze temperatures will be much milder than they have been. into wednesday and the frontal system is lingering slowly across parts of the country. the next front and low pressure system waiting out in the wings. on wednesday, another mild day with cloud around. rain clearing towards the east and showers from the west. a milder and more unsettled week ahead. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is tom donkin. our top stories: build a wall, we'll tear it down. build a wall, we'll tear it down. protests in the united states after donald trump signs an executive order banning migrants and refugees from several muslim countries. in a setback for the new us president, a federaljudge issues an emergency stay order that temporarily blocks the government from deporting people
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who land with valid visas. when president trump enacts laws or executive orders that are unconstitutional and illegal, the courts are there to defend everybody‘s rights. the british prime minister and the turkish president have signed a $125 million defence agreement during their talks in ankara. wildfires burning out of control in chile have claimed at least 11 lives and left thousands homeless.
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